Stability EP without a doubt. It has the old school DCfC harmony juxtapositions of the Photo Album with the sweeping, emotionally draining bittersweet of Transatlanticism. The Plans version of "Stability" ("The Stable Song") is in every way inferior to this version, and "20th Century Towers" may be my all time favorite DCfC song. I NEED THIS ON VINYL AND THIS IS THE ONLY WAY TO GET IT.

WHITE ALBUM by far. It has the most Paul swag, most John songbirding, most George experimentation, and "Helter Skelter" alone proves that Ringo is one of the most badass drummers of all time. It is the ultimate all-encompassing Beatles record and the best double album ever made.

It's a tossup between "Essex Dogs" and "This Is A Low". It's songs like this where Damon Albarn and crew went from being just another Brit pop band to being a Beatles to the alternative generation. They had their singles, but they also had stuff that seriously messed with your head. It's places like this where it was obvious that Gorillaz, GB&Q, and Rocket Juice & The Moon would happen eventually. It's also songs like this where you see that Blur definitely had a finite lifespan, and why they are having so much trouble putting a comeback album together.

No one is good on SNL. Does anyone remember Chris Martin prancing around the stage to "Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall" in an extra small pink tee and glorified sweatpants? The stage/the atmosphere/the mix just sucks. Thus, being a musical guest on SNL is a necessary evil - if you aren't a musical superstar like Gaga or Coldplay, then playing on SNL is nothing more than a way to garner attention to yourself.
Even still, Lana needs to figure out her stage image, which doesn't necessarily have to be exactly the same as her existing music video/photo/modeling image. What have we seen Lana Del Rey do in her music videos? Sit between tigers, sit on a throne, stand by random objects, make out with tattoos guy, scowl, frown, scowl more, etc. None of these things are fun to watch in a live setting (except maybe the tigers), so maybe she should grab a guitar (so the standing in place isn't so painful) or take some dancing lessons.
Finally, her voice kinda threw me off because with songs like "Blue Jeans" and "Off To The Races" she goes from the very low end of her register to the high end in such a short amount of time. Honestly, I like the weird inflection of her voice. More than anything, it reminds me that LDR is attempting to pursue an image beyond "indie pop icon". Maybe she just listened to a lot of Janis Joplin growing up?
I suppose we'll see how the rest of the album fares. But as of now, LDR is walking a hard line between "serious pop" and "I can sort of jam to this in the car pop", and she can't really do that for much longer before going one way or the other, and whichever direction she ends up picking is ultimately going to dictate what her stage performance becomes.

White Album
The most marvelous exploration of sound, ideas, and songwriting in a short amount of time. When you have a deadline and allow your creative process to dominate your perfectionist tendencies magic happens. It happened on tracks like "Yer Blues", "Happiness is a Warm Gun", "Why Don't We Do It In The Road?", "Julia", and "Mother Nature's Son".
Also, up to this point in time, NO ONE had written a song like "Revolution 9", which used looped samples of sound to create something haunting, terrifying, and ultimately mind-blowing. Other bands like the Doors with "The End" and the Velvet Underground with "European Son" had written really long, experimental, swirling pieces of ambient noise, but no one used loops and samples like the Beatles did. Are the Beatles the overlords of ambient techno? Yes, yes they are.

it feels like Alan wasn't afraid to be himself on this album. Psychic Chasms is amazing, but at times feels forcibly chill wave. Era is a beautiful mess. It is "post punk all the way" in the sense that most glam/post punk albums from the late 70s early 80s were a total mess and all over the place, but 100% memorable and influential. Alan used a beautiful formula and got a great album out of it. I'm excited to get my PAL 198X.

The sonic presence that Jay/Ye chose for this wasn't really what I was expecting at all. Supposedly, a couple of these tracks were written and thrown down before the release of My Beautiful Dark... because Kanye chose to include a couple of the WTT tracks on MBDTF and G.O.O.D. Fridays (stuff like So Appalled, the Power remix, etc.). This is surprising to me because MBDTF felt pretty "concept album"-ey. That being said, the fact that WTT is kind of a mixed bag and doesn't flow half as well as either of these artists latest solo albums isn't really surprising.
After "Otis" came out, I was really hoping that more of this would follow. I don't know if I'm alone in thinking that H.A.M totally sucked. After that came out, I lost all excitement for WTT, but "Otis" changed things. Aside from the sample itself, the song is really simple - just a handful of great verses by two great rappers. I feel like Jay and Ye could sit down in a studio with a bag of simplistic minimalist beats and go back and forth for an hour and make a fantastic album. WTT didn't NEED to be sonically complex. Songs like "new day" give a glimpse of that. But what makes WTT both more and less than what I was expecting is the fact that it's not. Songs like "no church in the wild", "lift off", "made in america" and others remind us that both of these excellent artists can continue to reinvent the game. But in other places, I felt like there was too much production and not enough of what makes me love both of these artists - excellent delivery and memorable verses.
This album wasn't what I was hoping for, but it's still good. This is, in my opinion, the only evidence that Jay Z and Kanye are getting older. This album doesn't have the edge that Blueprint 3 and My Beautiful Dark had AT ALL. It's like a great B-Sides album - a bunch of stuff that you are glad you can finally hear, but not an "album". That being said, glad Frank Ocean is on two of the tracks. I gotta hand it to the guy - he got damn lucky that the Odd Future fad popped up on the radar while WTT was looking for a crooner. I'll happily be blasting this in the car with friends, but I guarantee I won't be pulling it out six or eight months later the same way I did with both of these artists' last one or two albums.